Vox Day’s fans are making him an enemies list. But they’re not checking it twice

A few days ago, racist skeezeball fantasy author Vox Day noted on his blog just how nice it would be to have a handy public list of all the people he hates. Sorry, a list of “confirmed SJWs.” It would be a handy resource, he said, both for SJWs looking to hire other SJWs, as well as “for those who wish to keep their organizations free of the creatures.”

You can probably figure out which of these two reasons is the real reason for the list, and which is the utterly transparent fig leaf.

Vox helpfully suggested that anyone seeking to make such a list could start with the names of those who signed a petition condemning a scheduled speech by programmer Curtis Yarvin at the upcoming LambdaConf, on the grounds that Yarvin, also known as Mencius Moldbug, is not only a programmer but is also “a founder and advocate of an ideological movement that promotes racist bigotry,” not to mention “an apologist for slavery.”

No sooner had Vox made this suggestion than a such a list appeared, in the form of a Wiki (archived here), featuring the petition-signers and a handful of other alleged SJWs. Vox claims not to have a direct hand in what the site rather misleadingly calls The Complete List of SJWs, attributing its sudden appearance to his followers — or, as he likes to call them, the “Dread Ilk.” But this is clearly the beginnings of the enemies list of Vox’s dreams.

So how does one get on such a list? The listmakers themselves don’t seem altogether sure. At first, they declare that

[t]he SJWs listed should be on the record supporting censorship of some kind (no platforming, government censorship, or disemploying people). This is not a place for grudges.

In the wiki’s FAQ, they reiterate this point, saying they will only include those who have

publicly called for someone to be fired, disinvited, shunned, no-platformed, or otherwise punished or silenced for refusing to submit to the SJW Narrative. The particular incident is linked to your name in the list.

Immediately after this pronouncement, though, they declare that the list will also contain the names of those who have declared themselves SJWs, as well as journalists who’ve published “articles that support the SJW Narrative” — whatever that means — “or an SJW attack campaign.”

So far they have not been following these rules very carefully. Some names appear on the list with noinformation given about their alleged “incidents.” Others are included, well, apparently just because Vox and his Ilk don’t like them.

The list also maliciously deadnames several trans women, attempting to justify this despicable policy by suggesting that these women are using “pseudonyms in place of their actual, legal names in an attempt to obfuscate their identities.” This is obvious nonsense.

So who makes the list?

The vast majority of the names on the list are simply people who signed the LamdaConf petition.

But there are some other, more recognizable, names. John Scalzi, a science fiction author who has long been Vox’s greatest nemesis, makes the list, naturally; the listmakers blame him for Vox’s expulsion from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, though it is perhaps more accurate to say that Vox was expelled for being a huge racist dickhead.

Cartoonist and memoirist Alison Bechdel is included on the list because, 30 years ago, she drew a comic strip in which one of the characters said she only went to movies that featured at least two female characters who talk to one another, at least once, about something other than a man.

This comic strip is the origin of what’s now called the “Bechdel Test,” but Bechdel herself never publicized the “test,” the idea for which (as she freely admits) she got from a friend.

Actor, writer and geek icon Will Wheaton makes the list for Tweeting comments defending actress and Geek and Sundry founder Felicia Day, a friend of his, after a Destructoid writer, apparently drunk, made some ignorant and misogynistic remarks about her. The writer was fired, as drunken dickheads who do stupid things when they’re drunk sometimes are. “This tweet exemplifies [Wheaton’s] SJW status,” the listmakers sniff.

Writer, and former Jeopardy champion Arthur Chu is on the list because he jokingly referred to himself as “a social justice stormtrooper” and because “he is alleged to have been responsible for the bomb threat that disrupted the #GamerGate meetup in Washington D.C. on May 1, 2015.”

That’s right” “he is alleged.” There is absolutely no evidence, or even a good reason to suspect, that he had anything whatsoever to do with the alleged bomb threat. Gamergaters essentially decided to accuse him of making the threat because they don’t like him. And that’s good enough for Vox’s listmakers!

And then there’s Carpenter Brut, a composer included on the list because he objected to his music being used without permission in a virulently anti-refugee “documentary” titled “With Open Gates: The Forced Collective Suicide of European Nations.”

This 20-minute propaganda film is essentially a collection of out-of-context video clips edited together into a melodramatic montage by an 8chan user who debuted it by posting it to the notoriously racist /pol/ board; it’s been pretty thoroughly debunked by, among others, Snopes.com (which declared it “deceptive”) and Vice (which described it as “a mishmash of comically fake and out-of-context footage, bad subtitling and Islamophobic propaganda”).

Brut objected to having his music in this piece of garbage, so now he’s on the list.

Perhaps the list should be renamed The Complete List of Really Pretty Decent People Who’ve Offended Vox Day by Being Really Pretty Decent.

You probably wouldn’t accept the anecdotal evidence that my Ethiopian friends use sunscreen, even on sunny days in Britain (well, the women anyway, blokes obviously aren’t going to let a little thing like melanoma risk bother them) so here’s an academic paper (it’s actually about cosmetic regulation in Ethiopia, but it mentions sunscreen).

So, they’re compiling a list of SJWs “for those who wish to keep their organizations free of the creatures”. And the criterion for appearing on the list is “be[ing] on the record supporting censorship of some kind (no platforming, government censorship, or disemploying people)”. Doesn’t that mean that anyone who supports the list should add their own name?

Oh wait, the criterion is actually having “publicly called for someone to be fired, disinvited, shunned, no-platformed, or otherwise punished or silenced for refusing to submit to the SJW Narrative”. Of course, silly me, I forgot that calling for someone to experience negative consequences as a result of expressing their views is only wrong when those views are anti-SJW. Carry on!

@Paradoxical Intention
That was amazing!

David Gerard wrote:

LambdaConf’s frankly bizarre social justice Time Cube “final statement”, in which John DeGoes attempts to derive the concept of “inclusivity” from first philosophical principles, complete with made-up jargon words and diagrams.

That was amazing too, in a rather different way! I think for me the two highlights were:

1) the section “Me & The Other”, consisting in its entirety of a square with diagonal arrows going from “me” on the x-axis and “defend” on the y-axis to “the other” on the x-axis and “attack” on the y-axis and from “me” on the x-axis and “attack” on the y-axis to “the other” on the x-axis and “defend” on the y-axis, oh yes, and there’s also a dashed line extending all the way across halfway up at “neutral” on the y-axis (because clearly that is totally self-explanatory and requires no textual elaboration whatsoever),

and 2) the following section, “Moral Reasoning”, again consisting solely of a diagram, in this case showing a horizontal scale running from “When considering actions, I am only concerned with whether they are morally right, not their effects on others” on the left to “When considering actions, I am only concerned with their effects on others, not their assigned moral labels” (along with a little circle at the midpoint, to which an arrow points with the text “Most people fall in here somewhere”). This taught me a lot because I always thought that one of the most important things in determining whether something was morally right was its effects on other people, but I now realise that I must have been wrong! (I guess in all seriousness, perhaps I was, thinking about it – is “moral” a technical term that refers to things that have been deemed good by some society or accepted text, and what I’m thinking of is “ethical”?)

@weirwoodtreehugger:
„I thought all these dudes were libertarians?”
Vox Day isn’t libertarian, even rational wiki describes him as a pseudo-libertarian, his views are best described as conservative-liberal. As for his fans – why would they be exclusively libertarians? He writes more about racism, atheism and ‘sjws’ than about statism or libertarianism (the newest blog post I could find on that topic was from 2011).

“Property rights – and that would include intellectual property – is a pretty essential part of libertarianism”
No. That’s propertarianism. Libertarianism (or at least the deontological variation of anarcho-capitalism) is based on self-ownership and the homesteading principle, and only the property gained in accordance to these principles is regarded as valid. For this reason libertarians are, and have always been, against IP. If you are interested in libertarian arguments against ip then see Kinsella’s ‘Against Intellectual Property’.

“It’s almost like reactionaries really think”
o.O
Since when libertarianism is reactionary?

“freedom means”
Freedom is defined in libertarianism as the lack of physical coercion.

“I do whatever I want and everyone does what I want too.”
that’s because they are not libertarians, but intellectual parasites who use parts of libertarianism and sometimes the label itself as weapons in their little tribal wars.

@ Pietro_McM:
“Libertarianism can only be a broad spectrum”
Well, no. The word ‘libertarianism’ was adopted by late 19th century anarchists to escape the stigma associated with the word ‘anarchism’ (much like atheists often call themselves irreligious, non-believers or agnostics), the word literally means anarchist, so if someone is not an anarchist they cannot be libertarian. And yes, I know there is lots of ideologies/ethical systems/theories of rights/etc., that an object to/dislike the state, but that does not make them into a spectrum, rather the anarchist part is an intersection.

“by definition”
What definition?

“Far at the right end of the spectrum, there are the lone, self-regarding ego-maniacs, like Anders Breivik. Donald Trump/Drumpf, for an example, is obviously a bit more towards the right-end of the spectrum”
Wait, what? Are you seriously calling Breivik and Trump libertarians?
And why would ‘self-regarding ego-maniacs’ be on the right side of the spectrum if major part of right-wing ideologies (doesn’t matter if American or European) is the destruction of the self and submission to collectives (family, community, etc.) or hierarchies (church, state, ‘the head of the family’, etc.)?

I don’t really know or care whether or not Vox Day self identifies as libertarian. I was more snarking on the manosphere as a whole which does have tendencies towards being libertarian identified.

I can’t help but notice that there’s a lot of No True Scotsmanning whenever someone who is either a self-identified libertarian or has positions borrowed from libertarianism is a buffoon and/or ethically bankrupt asshole. All of a sudden, if they don’t exactly fit some increasingly obscure century old philosophy, they aren’t a true libertarian.

That definition of “true libertarians” works if and only if you also acknowledge that there are virtually no actual libertarians in the wild, as it were–that the vast, vast majority of the people who use the label are nothing of the sort.

In other words, they’re either repugnant or marginal; you can’t claim the nu

@ weirwoodtreehugger:
”which does have tendencies towards being libertarian identified.”
They also have a tendency to self-identify as human rights activists and philosophers.
And frankly, I haven’t noticed that tendency – I’ve seen a couple of ex-libertarians here and there, some more important figures call themselves libertarian (I can’t think of anyone except Molyneux and Day…), but the vast majority are openly statist, in fact one of the largest websites is called ‘the return of kings’… not a very libertarian title…

“I can’t help but notice that there’s a lot of No True Scotsmanning”
That isn’t how no true scotsman works. First you are the one making broad statements about libertarians:
“In other words, some of them are dropping the pretense that there’s any kind of high minded ideals behind libertarianism and just admitting they want to be a selfish asshole and do anything they like with no consequences?”
And I’m the one who provides you with information contradicting those statements.
Second I have given you an objective method to determine if someone is libertarian, or if an idea is a part of libertarianism – does whatever they said follow logically from the non-aggression principle (in this case self-ownership and homesteading principle)? No? then it’s not a part of libertarianism and person making that statement is not a libertarian or it’s just a personal opinion of a libertarian. And yes, libertarians can be unpleasant people – there is no ‘be nice’ principle (although there are some people that argue for one, if you’re interested google Jeffrey Tucker, and I think the ‘bleeding heart libertarians’ also wrote about it).

”whenever someone who is either a self-identified libertarian or has positions borrowed from libertarianism is a buffoon and/or ethically bankrupt asshole.”
The same happens to popular people who self-identify as libertarians, but aren’t. Maher, Harris and Rice are examples.

“All of a sudden, if they don’t exactly fit some increasingly obscure century old philosophy, they aren’t a true libertarian.”
Well, if they don’t fit the definition of a libertarian, if what they say goes against every principle of libertarianism, then they are not libertarians.
Also the tradition in much older than that, and modern libertarianism, anarcho-capitalism, is slightly younger.

@ Freemage:
“That definition of “true libertarians” works if and only if you also acknowledge that there are virtually no actual libertarians in the wild”
Did I give you any reason to believe that I don’t acknowledge it?

“that the vast, vast majority of the people who use the label are nothing of the sort.”
Well, yes, that’s kind of what I wrote, isn’t it?

You should be ashamed of liking 30 Seconds to Mars in and of itself. Good taste is probably as foreign a concept to your palate as sunscreen to an Ethiopian.

Well, Ethiopians typically don’t need sunscreen because their bodies have melanin, so your little comparison falls flat there. I’m pretty sure we didn’t ‘evolve’ tastes in music. Develop, sure, but not ‘evolve’ over the course of billions of years.

Also, you’re getting pretentious over what sound vibrations I like in my earholes? Squirrel, please. You’re being very silly.

Good or bad, that shit’s all relative to the listener. I’m sure you listen to stuff I wouldn’t like, but you don’t see me getting a redwood up my butt about it.

I listen to all kinds of music, and like all kinds of music. I still like 30 Seconds to Mars despite Leto’s edgelord shenanigans, and I will continue to do so despite you (or now to spite you, whichever I feel like).

Actually, everyone should wear sun screen since it helps with UV rays which causes skin cancer. It doesn’t just prevent sunburn but can help prevent cancer.

So, please, wear sunscreen regardless of how dark your skin is or if you sunburn easily or not, please, and remember to cover up and wear a shady hat when working under sunny conditions. Especially make sure children take extra care. There are plenty of easily appliable and waterproof products to help most everyone.

^My sociology professor from last semester had an experience related to that. He’s white, but has a black adopted son, and told his son to wear sunscreen. “But I’m black, Dad!” “Don’t care, you still need it!”

We Hunted the Mammoth tracks and mocks the white male rage underlying the rise of Trump and Trumpism. This blog is NOT a safe space; given the subject matter -- misogyny and hate -- there's really no way it could be.